10 Breakout Films of Sundances Past, and Where to Stream Them

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The Sundance Film Festival started Thursday in Park City, Utah, where through Jan. 28 many of the year’s most anticipated indie films will be making their debuts. The festival is also prohibitively expensive to attend, difficult to navigate, and is usually blisteringly cold and slushy. Opting for the couch instead? Host your own film festival, featuring these popular and influential movies from Sundance festivals past.

Sundance was still known by its original moniker, the U.S. Film Festival (though its operation had just been assumed by the Sundance Institute), when the Coen Brothers’ debut film won the Grand Jury Prize for a drama in 1985. A delightfully inventive and deliciously scuzzy riff on the classics of film noir, it takes the genre’s stock characters — the honorable private eye; the femme fatale; the innocent man, wrongly accused — and turns them upside down, all while showing off the kind of razzle-dazzle visual style that has helped define their work ever since (and the work of director Barry Sonnenfeld, who was their cinematographer). And it was the film debut of Frances McDormand, who is both earnest and ruthless as the female lead.

Steven Soderbergh’s feature debut — which won the Audience Award and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes — was, in many ways, the quintessential Sundance movie: small in scale and intimate in scope, consisting mostly of four people talking in rooms. But the subject of that talk (sex, and the lack thereof) and the intensity and candor of that talk were what made the movie so singularly compelling, along with the deftly observed performances of its four lead actors (Andie MacDowell, James Spader, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo). Its subsequent acquisition and commercial success helped make studios aware of how much money could be made by these small-budget movies they were showing up in the mountains.

In 1991, Quentin Tarantino made use of the Sundance Institute Lab Program — which pairs novice directors with experienced mentors — to workshop his screenplay about a jewel heist gone awry. (Among Tarantino’s most important mentors there was the director Terry Gilliam.) The next year, he returned to Park City with the finished feature, which notoriously failed to win at Sundance but went on to blow through the indie world like a tornado. Assembling an enviable ensemble cast of hard-boiled character actor types, Tarantino shook up the clichés of the heist movie: He skipped over the robbery itself entirely, focusing instead on the assembly of the crew and their frayed nerves at a meet-up afterward, keeping viewers off-balance with a scrambled chronology that revealed new complexities of plot and character with each scene.

Two years later, another scrappy, movie-crazy kid brought this chatty, low-budget debut to Sundance and took the town by storm, winning a filmmakers’ trophy for dramatic features. But unlike his predecessors on this list, that filmmaker, Kevin Smith, wasn’t trying to impress anyone with the slickness of his debut feature; he embraced the low budget, shooting his grubby, grainy movie during late nights at the convenience store and video shop where he worked (and which inspired the events of the film). Ultimately, its surveillance-camera aesthetic worked to the picture’s benefit; it captured a particular kind of pop-culture-obsessed slacker, and became a defining ode to Generation X.

The audience at the midnight premiere of this 1999 entry by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez was particularly lucky, as it was the only audience to see it entirely unspoiled — and thus, left to stumble out into the snow at 2 a.m., unsure whether they’d just witnessed a kind of snuff film or a very clever mockumentary. That thin line between stylistic fact and narrative fiction continued to compel and confuse audiences well past that first late-night screening, turning “Blair Witch” into the first Sundance film to gross over $100 million when it hit theaters that summer — and reminding moviegoers that the tension of peering into the darkness could prove far scarier than scenes of blood and gore.

By the end of the 1990s, Sundance had become the target festival for American independent filmmakers — and industry types had begun to descend on Park City every January to pluck out the Next Big Thing. They found two of them in this 2000 drama (which won a directing award and tied for the Grand Jury Prize): director Karyn Kusama, who crafts this story of a take-no-prisoners female boxer with a verisimilitude and frankness that transcends sports movie clichés, and Michelle Rodriguez, whose leading performance is equal parts tough and tender. Both later found success in much bigger pictures, but they’ve rarely found such perfect expressions of their singular voices.

In the years since “Girlfight,” Sundance’s programmers have clearly attempted to widen the scope of the stories its filmmakers tell, complementing their always noteworthy world-cinema programming by increasing the number of works by women and people of color in the domestic selections. One of the best of the recent crop is this intimate character study from the writer-director Dee Rees (who went on to direct and help write “Mudbound”), which concerns a young Brooklyn lesbian’s voyage of self-discovery. The story may not be earth-shattering, but the approach is: Rees renders her story with an insider’s eye, filling her frames with characters we rarely see in mainstream cinema and approaching them with the kind of empathy and honesty that’s just as rare.

Director Ava DuVernay and her “Selma” star David Oyelowo first collaborated for this keenly observed and deeply moving drama about a kindhearted young woman (Emayatzy Corinealdi) who begins to question her dedication to her incarcerated husband when she meets a warm and winning bus driver (Oyelowo). DuVernay dramatizes these lives of quiet desperation with subtlety and grace, and the performances are remarkable; Corinealdi is particularly skilled at putting across the emotional urgency of her character’s situation and the questions it prompts about who she is and who she wants to be. DuVernay won the directing award for a domestic drama for “Middle of Nowhere,” making her the first African-American woman to take that prize.

Justin Simien won a special jury award for breakthrough talent for this fiercely funny and wickedly provocative take on race and gender relations on college campuses, which hit Park City like a lightning bolt in 2014. Wittily orchestrating the attempts by several characters to fit in or call out their contemporaries, Simien’s scathing screenplay is both socially conscious and blissfully entertaining — a kind of hybrid between intellectual debate and sketch comedy. And he provides a showcase for a star-making performance by Tessa Thompson, who burns with the rage of a campus activist and slowly reveals the complex allegiances that motivate her.

Every once in a while, a quiet, unknown film breaks through the buzz and noise at Sundance, often by being precisely the kind of movie you wouldn’t expect to see there. That happened in 2015, when audiences of the festival’s midnight sidebar discovered this self-described “New England folktale,” in which a banished Puritan family in 17th-century America comes under the sway of genuine and frightening evil. The writer and director Robert Eggers — who won the directing prize for a domestic drama — manifests dread and fear without the benefit of explicit gore (much as “The Blair Witch Project” did a decade and a half before), using his sure command of tone and mood to trap the viewer inside a legitimately creepy world.